Researcher helps figure it all out

STOCKTON - Some people see numbers and get dizzy. Campbell "Cam" Bullock sees numbers and gets clarity.

Kevin Parrish

STOCKTON - Some people see numbers and get dizzy. Campbell "Cam" Bullock sees numbers and gets clarity.

Campbell, 43, runs an under-the-radar applied social research and evaluation organization known as San Joaquin Community Data Co-Op from inside the CalWORKS building on Oak Street.

His third-floor suite is part office, part war room, part brain trust and part number-crunching center.

"I love the combination of applying data to community needs," Bullock said. "I am driven by end results and outcomes."

The small nonprofit group's primary work is in helping other nonprofit organizations, government agencies and businesses objectively review data - and then decide what to do with it.

Data Co-Op, founded in 1996, is unusually busy these days helping San Joaquin County with its evaluation of AB109, the cornerstone legislation realigning California's state prison system as mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Under the plan, low-risk inmates are being shifted from overcrowded state prisons to county jails.

Data Co-Op is helping San Joaquin County evaluate that process.

"It's challenging and exciting," Bullock said. "We are working with all the different partners."

He was born in New Zealand, raised in Menlo Park, educuated at University of California, Davis (undergraduate) and San Jose State (master's degree in sociology).

Bullock lives in Galt with his wife, Joann, and their children, 15-year-old Hannah and 10-year-old Christopher.

He is deeply invested in the Stockton area and helps coach a co-ed youth soccer team in the troubled Kentfield neighborhood. The team exists in part because the Stockton Police Department and the Kentfield Action Team have put together positive alternatives for young people.

He's been reporting for work at the Co-Op for more than a decade. In 2005, he became the executive director.

"I wanted to find ways to connect with the community and to give back," said Bullock, who is one of two full-time employees. The other is Olga Goltvyanitsa, a University of the Pacific graduate who is from the Ukraine. She's been with the Co-Op seven years. There are four part-time researchers.

"People need assistance in evaluating their work, in applying for grants," Bullock says.

That's where Data Co-Op steps in. The company handles a dozen or so client projects a year.

Thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Lucile Packard Foundation, the Stockton-based researchers tackled children's health last summer.

Using data from the foundation's Kidsdata.org and working with the epidemiology team from San Joaquin County Public Health Services, the Co-Op produced findings that could serve county agencies on the front lines of children's health.

(Epidemiology is the study of the patterns, causes, and effects of health-and-disease conditions in defined populations.)

"This study was me really pushing out into the community, to public dissemination, to getting these findings to clients on the ground."